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Moby Dick

Moby Dick

List Price: $85.95
Your Price: $85.95
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Cap. Ahab ... killed by his own obsession.
Review: What I thought was great about this book was that it teaches you to not get carried away with what you want.Sometimes if your not too careful it may even lead to death.(just like what happened to Captain Ahab)

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Excellent
Review: It was hard to get into but it was excellent at the end, a lot of people misinterperet the book as the hunt for the White Whale, but it's actually a long book about the history of whaling

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: mixed feelings
Review: I've read Moby Dick twice. The first time, no one forced me to, I just picked it up and read it [I was in eighth grade]. I hated it! It was one of the most aggravatingly tedious books I'd ever read. I didn't have anything good to say about Melville after that. I was required to reread it as a senior in high school, and then I began to understand my earlier frustration. Melville tells an excellent compelling story which draws the reader in. He also, however, gives an in depth description of every obscure detail of whaling. So, while the first 70 pages or so are interesting and even amusing to most readers [Fr. Mapple's sermon, Ismael's befriending of Queequeg] once the voyage gets underway, Ishmael drops out of the story, and the story itself is continually abandoned in favor of a description of the finer details of turning blubber into oil. But most aggravating of all was the fact that nothing was seen of Moby Dick for the first 500 pages. While this is supposedly building suspense, and preparing the reader for the predictable, but unexpeccted ending, it can be nerve-wracking at times. If I weren't so interested in the story, I wouldn't have minded. Basically, Melville is a brilliant story teller, but reading the whaling scenes in Moby Dick is like reading the lists of fish seen in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I do think the story is worth reading, though. So, if anyone can tolerate three chapters of "whales in art", then, well, they willl be rewarded by 25 pages of wonderful action and suspense in the end. Whether this is worth the time or commitment, I leave to the reader. There is much more in the book than the movie, but essentially all the action has been carried over into the movie w/ Patrick Stewart as Ahab. Nevertheless, the book is still, strangely better. No one should ever be forced to read Moby Dick. Most people hate books they are forced to read and it's easy enough to hate Moby Dick w/o that. If you are interested, try it, and remember that the story really picks up on page 500. Also, the themes are very interesting, adn some scenes, such as Starbuck's debate w/ himself over his duty to dispose of Ahab, and some of Stubb's monologues are very memorable. I don't like reading abriged versions of anything [except Princess Bride]. Some people consider this book a classic, for the content and the poetry, but I completely sympathize w/ those who have difficulty wading through the volume of unrelated matter, such as why whales are fish, not mammals.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: BORING
Review: tHIS BOOK IS BORING. iT TAKES A LONG TIME BEFORE THE STORY BEGINS......

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Moby Ick
Review: Moby Ick's more like it. A PIECE-O-TRASH! SENSELESS

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: If you want a quick chew on some brain gum, don't buy this.
Review: This book is not for the faint hearted, but if you truly want to learn to read, this is the book for you.

Melville starts with the bones of a good story, adds the meat of interesting characters, and then augments that with layer upon layer of detail and symbolism, each of which is as rich (and hard to bring home) as the whale oil the characters seek.

If you love MTV, you'll hate Moby Dick; it is not easy to get through and find the plot. But if you like poetry and enjoy searching for symbolism in deep details, you will ultimately enjoy this book.

My advice to those who are looking for quick gratification and have been assigned this book for an English class: read the first hundred or so pages, then skip to the last fifty. This will give you the basic plot and let you enjoy the action. Then go back to the center pages you skipped (if you don't you will be doing yourself no favors) and read those pages as you would poetry. I must admit that I wish I had done this the first time I read it: I spent a good long time wishing Ahab would please hurry up and catch his silly fish!

So read this book and savor it. It isn't the action-packed adventure about a man and a whale that one might expect from the movies. Instead it's a thought provoking work about the nature of man.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Disappointing as it is supposedly America's greatest classic
Review: I do not mean to offend anyone, but Moby Dick is a disappointment. Having read several reviews on the text, I believed it was one of the greatest of American Literary works. When I began, the tale proved to be accepatable and I found its insights profound indeed. However, the story quickly became tedious and boring (it seemed that Melville could not come up with any new material, so expanded on the mental processes of Ishmael). I wondered how readers could rate a story which had little (if any) plot and moved extremely slowly, as a great novel. True, literature is seldom interesting, and authors like Dickens and George Eliot are hardly better than Melville, but nevertheless, I believe that a literary text should at least be able to engage the reader and make him/her interested enough in it to finish it, so that the message can be fully comprehended. I did not finish Moby Dick and perhaps never will. I do not recommend it to readers. However, to give Melville credit, Moby Dick is an accurate portrayl of the American spirit in that context and thus, in that sense, does hold that mirror up to nature, as literature often does.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: The worst homework I've ever had!
Review: I despised this book from beginning to end, this is the most torture I have ever had, and I love to read! I enjoyed the movie, but the novel was filled with so much extra rubbish that I could hardly differentiate the novel from the movie. I think Melville was a genius, yes, but the structure in which he wrote the book did not make sense. Don't read this book if you don't have to, and if you have to read it..get the cliff notes!

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: For boring people who couldn't get any more boring
Review: What a waste of time! This book is very, very boring. I've said it & I'll say it again: this book is very, very, extremely, boring. I refrained from giving it 1 star to the fact that yes, it has its good points...if you ever get to them.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Awful
Review: Moby Dick is the most BORING book I have ever read! I think if you made it into a short comic strip, you would have liked it. But this 550 page account called a novel? No way, man. I implore you, do NOT read this book. If it's required, then do so. But if you have other options, turn to those. We were given a list of books in English class, and I chose to read this. After a week, I was just in page 103. It was needed the next day, so I panicked and switched books, and bought War and Peace. And I finished that book in 8 hours of straight reading.


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